Amar Sagoo

13 May 2005

Scroll-ahead

Although scrolling on the iPod is famously easy compared to other music players because of its wheel, it still has one problem: when scrolling quickly through a long list, for example all your artists, you are very likely to shoot past the artist you want to select. So the typical procedure is:

  1. Scroll down quickly until you see the desired artists whizzing past.
  2. Scroll back up more slowly until they re-emerge at the top of the screen
  3. If you missed them again, scroll down one or two rows until you've finally got them.

The basic problem is that most of the time while scrolling, the selection is right at the top or right at the bottom of the screen, meaning you need superhuman reflexes to stop in time when the correct artist's name appears.

A solution would be to keep the selection near the middle of the screen (unless you're right at the beginning or the end of the list, of course). That way, you can see a few rows ahead while scrolling, because your artist's name will become visible just before it becomes selected.

I sent this as a suggestion to Apple a while ago, but I'm not too optimistic about who actually gets to read what's sent through their feedback page.

7 May 2005

Smart Library drops

Ever since Mac OS X came out, I have been missing how the classic Finder used to try to recognise what kind of file you dropped on the system folder and would offer you to move it to the right place automatically, for example Extensions or Conrol Panels.

With new kinds of extensions being introduced in every version of Mac OS X (Preference Panes, Contextual Menu Items, Screen Savers, Widgets, Dictionaries, Image Units), it would be very convenient if we could just drop these on one of the Library folders and let the world’s most advanced operating system handle the details.